Press Release

Since the 1960s Los Angeles has been a seminal location for experimental photography. Robert Heinecken’s founding of the photography program at UCLA has not only impacted generations of artists using photography but also set the parameters for the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts’ subsequent collecting in this area. His students and successors—such as Jo Ann Callis, Judy Fiskin, and James Welling—have gone on to teach and influence a younger generation of artists, including Amy Adler, Anne Collier, and Florian Maier-Aichen among many others. Callis’s approach to the constructed image provides one access point in a history that spans the work of John Outterbridge, the conceptual experiments of Barbara T. Smith and Allen Ruppersberg, and the contemporary photographs of Collier, Luisa Lambri, and Sharon Lockhart. Drawn from the Hammer Contemporary Collection and the Grunwald Center, this exhibition looks at the themes of seriality, identity, and place in conceptual photography on the West Coast from the 1960s to the present.This exhibition is organized by chief curator Connie Butler with Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett, curatorial associate.